Monday, March 25th, 2024
This will be short. I just logged into Chrome for the first time in a few days. Apparently, there was a recent update and Chrome presented me with a full page invitation to engage with and begin using their AI product. They even supplied me with an example of how their AI product would help me. And, I am horrified.
Think of it like this.
If your back is broken and you are paralyzed, you need a wheelchair. If you are a perfectly healthy eleven year old, you don’t. So, what happens if you put eleven year olds into wheelchairs and encourage them to wheel around school, town and their house? If they take you up on the offer, they will become unhealthy.
That sounds crazy and extreme, but consider electric bikes. When I was a kid, all us young’uns raced around our neighborhoods or rode to school on regular bikes that built up our strength, stamina and cardiovascular health. We got hot, sweaty and tired, and we felt the exhilaration of our effort, the rush of a hard workout, the joy of relaxing after a hard climb up a steep hill, and we developed dexterity, balance, quick reflexes, and so on.
Today? You can find children riding around on electric bicycles in many neighborhoods given to them by well-meaning parents who think they’re being kind and helpful, but they’re just dumbing down and weakening their kids. Because those kids? They don’t ride the bike hard and use the assist just when they hit a super steep hill or for bringing home four bags of groceries. They sit on their ass, or stand on their pedals, and use the damn assist to buzz around the neighborhood like they’re on a scooter or motorcycle. I’ve seen it, time and again! And they are losing all the benefits of being a kid with a bike.
Now, take a look at this example of how great AI is for you and yours:
In other words:
No need to be able to compose a simple sentence.
No need to be able to use proper punctuation.
No need to spell.
No need to present yourself elegantly or intelligently.
No need to think about how you will be perceived.
No need to THINK AT ALL.
How can anyone view this as a positive?
If you are actually illiterate, you would benefit far more from learning how to read and write then becoming dependent upon a system like this that keeps you ignorant.
If you are young and in school, will you be motivated to do the work of learning, if you think, “I don’t have to know this, because a machine can do it for me?”
Fact: AI programs dumb down humans.
Question: What do we do about it?
You cannot dumb down what is absent. If a perfectly mentally capable person needs to do a certain task, he/she will do it, and most probably will take it as a small-step personal challenge. Meaning that we intuitively know that solving new problems will give us another fraction of inch progress in developing ourselves.
Why would you give it up and use software instead? Three main reasons: greed, power trip, lack of relevant knowledge.
Greed is when you want to do earn more (money, time, favors) by cheating. Cheating is when you are told to do something, but you outsource this action to third parties. You will earn more at the expense of other people, mostly those who are honest. No competing, greed always wins. Short-term.
Power trip is when you want to rise the ladder faster than others and you do not have what it takes in you. So you resort to cheating again. Old-style plagiarism is an example, or stealing somebody’s project and passing it on as your own creation. Again, you will win by cheating in most cases. Short-term.
Lack of relevant knowledge… including the ability to make proper linguistic expressions in your mother tongue. When greed and power trips are simply shortcuts to get something that you do not deserve, this one is self-damaging. By clicking the button “Think for me”, you deprive yourself of 24/7 exercising of the mind. You will become a master of copy-paste (some software takes even this effort and self-copies the result, so you only need to switch to another program and one-click paste), with increasingly diminishing mental abilities. Genius for 2 months, unemployable for life.
The karmic law is merciless. What you do, you will receive back in a multiplied form. Or, if you prefer cheating (aka using software - see my section on “AI or not AI” https://thepathishere.substack.com/s/ai-or-not-ai), maybe you don’t deserve to be a fully-competent thinking human being? Maybe you should remain on this level of cheating yourself?